Review: King’s Bounty: Warriors of the North

King’s Bounty, the cult turn-based strategy game is back with Warriors of the North. It’s a release that will go unnoticed by most gamers, but the series shouldn’t — it’s a fun, play-at-your-own-pace romp through a nonsensical fantasy realm that offers huge amounts of play time and many different levels of strategy.

In Warriors of the North, as in the previous King’s Bounty games, you control an army filled with character types of your choosing. Each costs you a certain amount of gold and has both a specific set of characteristics and abilities. Certain types complement others better, and with time players will go from going head-on against enemy armies to strategically picking them apart without losing a single soldier. This basic mechanic is unchanged from the previous games, the modern reincarnation of which was 2008’s King’s Bounty: The Legend. Battles take place after meeting an enemy in the game world — there are no chance encounters or surprises, you fight on your terms, usually after collecting the power-ups nearby. Stacked on top of the army-against-army fighting is a simple RPG system where you advance your character’s attributes, learn spells, collect armor, and complete achievements.

At the end of the game everything you’ve done is compiled into a single number, a score that rates your success. If you play on a harder difficulty, lose less characters, and sail from island to island less (island hopping consumes in-game time, but allows you to gain experience fighting easier foes and collecting more power-ups) your score will be higher. Hardcore KB players run through the game on Impossible, with zero losses, using an optimized island route to take up the least amount of time. It’s all pretty interesting, but an average run through a KB game will take 40+ hours (for the non-expert) so don’t expect to collect too many scores.

With the introduction out of the way, King’s Bounty: Warriors of the North changes very little from the past games. You play as a new character and there is a new setting — the frozen, Viking-inhabited north — but it would be easy to confuse this game with Legends, Armored Princess, or Crossworlds. In other words, the graphics, controls, setting, and overall look-and-feel will be nothing new for franchise veterans.

So why drop the $30? Not for the story. Each King’s Bounty game has its own completely unintelligible story that is supposed to be consumed by clicking through page after page of text. After just a few minutes of the game most people will realize there isn’t anything there for them. KB is about the chess-like battles, and little else. Ultimately this means that WotN‘s new material is mainly about the new lands, the new characters (generally recast version of old ones, like the new Ice Spider which looks a whole lot like a white Fiery Spider), and the powerful summons that you call upon. In Armored Princess and its expansion, Crossworlds, you had a dragon you could summon to help out in the battle. Now your player, Olaf, can fight and you can call upon Valkyries. It’s the same concept, with different graphics.

It’s immediately clear that KB:WotN brings little new to the table, but it does tweak an excellent formula. As the games have progressed since 2008 they have become better balanced, rough edges have been removed, and the run through the world has gotten them much smoother. Aside from crashing — which WotN does a lot, but I’m sure it will be fixed soon — the game has incrementally more polish than the ones before it. For the most part fans of the franchise will just be playing to get more time with King’s Bounty and to try out the new characters.

For players new to the franchise, WotN is a great starting point. It’s not dramatically better than the previous games, but the difficult ramp up is more gradual and there are less early-game stumbling blocks to get in your way. At Normal difficulty, the game throws massive amounts of cash at you so you can experiment with all sorts of different combinations as you figure out how to play. As with all the games in the series, there is very little in the way of tutorial, so you are on your own to learn the subtleties.

Warriors of the North‘s it’s-not-broken-so-why-fix-it approach will be more than fine with some gamers while it will be frustrating to others. Personally I’m satisfied with a new game that’s limited to new characters and the shift from a baby dragon summon to a Valkyrie, but I wish some progress could be made on other fronts. For example, the battle animations still take much too long, even when set to High. Trust me — after you’ve seen the Viking’s cheer 100 or so times, you’re ready to either turn off animations (not an option) or have them play back even faster than they do on High. The game simply takes too long, so cutting down on animation time would help things progress. I don’t want an abbreviated game, I just want to spend my time playing. Also, why do I still need to go into a .ini file, deep within Windows, to set the game to windowed mode? If games can have modern tools like Steam cloud sync and 3D I think something like this would be easy.

Warriors of the North is more of the same fun, flawed, drawn-out King’s Bounty experience. The series is very much on cruise control at this point, but I do think it’s rolling past some very nice scenery.